$ and lack of reason run the country

Sanders's report on Trump's infrastructure package. In the Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, the Koch Brothers’ Campaign Becomes Overt. If there was any lingering doubt that a tiny clique of fossil-fuel barons has captured America’s energy and environmental policies, it was dispelled last week, when the Trump Administration withdrew from the Paris climate accord.

Surveys showed that a majority of Americans in literally every state wanted to remain within the agreement, and news reports established that the heads of many of the country’s most successful and iconic Fortune 100 companies, from Disney to General Electric, did, too. Voters and big business were arrayed against leaving the climate agreement. Yet despite the majority’s sentiment, a tiny—and until recently, almost faceless—minority somehow prevailed. How this happened is no longer a secret. The answer, as the New York Times reported, on Sunday, is “a story of big political money.”
Facebook. The GOP of 2017 is the most extreme party coalition since the Civil War.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The Republican Party in 2017 isn’t an ordinary political party.

It is an ideological outlier, the most extreme party coalition since the Civil War.
Trump's Taiwan phone call preceded by hotel development inquiry. Weeks before President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial phone call with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, a businesswoman claiming to be associated with his conglomerate made inquiries about a major investment in building luxury hotels as part of the island’s new airport development.

Corporations Are Pouring Millions into Local Ballot Fights - BillMoyers.com. Corporations Are Pouring Millions into [...]

This post originally appeared at Common Dreams. This election cycle, corporate donors are not just beefing up the war chests of their most-favored politicians. According to a new study, industry is flexing its Supreme Court-approved political power to dominate local democracy, as well.
Koch Brothers Attempt to Kill Single-Payer Health Care in Colorado. Buying the War: How Big Media Failed Us - BillMoyers.com. ANNOUNCER (March 6, 2003): Ladies and Gentlemen: the President of the United States PRESIDENT BUSH: Good evening, I'm pleased to take your questions tonight.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Iraq is a part of the war on terror.
How One Organization Unravels Some of the Mystery of Campaign Finance. Following the money in state politics can be overwhelming at best, and impossible at worst.

Fortunately, political reporters, academics and citizens don’t have to start from scratch. Instead, they can search and click their way through 54 million campaign finance records meticulously gathered and filed by Edwin Bender and his team at the National Institute on Money in State Politics. NIMSP began nearly 25 years ago as a MacArthur-funded one-year project focused on the Northwest states.

Clueless about income inequality. Truth Behind Tax Day: Where Your Taxes Go. This post first appeared at the Campaign for America’s Future blog, OurFuture.org.

If you groan about tax day, you’re certainly not alone. But what if tax day was something we could be proud of as members of a democracy? Would you feel differently about paying taxes if you knew they were going to support public services that you, your family and your community rely on — such as public safety, roads and bridges, schools, health care, social services and national parks? Millions of Americans file their federal income tax returns in April each year with no idea what the government actually does with all that money.

This is surprising, considering that individuals are our nation’s primary bill payers.
Does Giving Money to the Rich Actually Help the Economy?
Trickle-down economics has long been considered a joke (and not just because the term is vaguely reminiscent of urine).

Now it seems we can finally put this faulty theory to rest. A report by several economists from the International Monetary Fund found that the idea that giving the rich more money benefits the economy on the whole does not ever play out that way in the real world. The IMF looked at 150 nations as models to study how an increase in the wealth gap benefited each country’s overall economy. The findings could not be any clearer: When rich people have a higher percentage of the money, economic growth slows significantly. Conversely, when the poorest 20 percent of a nation receive more money, the economy experiences a sharp increase. Looking at country after country, the economists had to admit that giving more money to people at the top has repeatedly stalled the growth of the GDP. Withholding money from the lowest 20 percent also weighs down the economy in other ways.
Republicans’ Baseless Abortion Investigation.

With its hidden-camera videos that took aim at Planned Parenthood, the Center for Medical Progress tried to stir up opposition to abortion rights by concocting a controversy over fetal tissue research.

Now Republicans in the House are doing much the same thing. Initially convened in response to the videos, the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, a part of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, pledges to “get the facts about medical practices of abortion service providers and the business practices of the procurement organizations who sell baby body parts.” Its first hearing last Wednesday was a showcase for fallacious attacks on fetal tissue research.
The best predictor of Trump support isn't income, education, or age. It's authoritarianism.
In the five days leading up to the South Carolina Republican primary I fielded a survey of 358 likely voters, hoping to better understand who supports Donald Trump, why, and what it may mean for the Republican presidential nominating contest.

What I found is a trend that has been widely overlooked. A voter’s gender, education, age, ideology, party identification, income, and race simply had no statistical bearing on whether someone supported Trump.
2016 campaign finance: How the Koch network rivals the GOP. The political machine that Charles Koch launched a dozen years ago in a Chicago hotel conference room with 16 other rich conservatives has exploded in size and influence in the past few elections and now eclipses the ofcanceficial GOP in key areas. Koch and his brother David Koch have quietly assembled, piece by piece, a privatized political and policy advocacy operation like no other in American history that today includes hundreds of donors and employs 1,200 full-time, year-round staffers in 107 offices nationwide. That’s about 3½ times as many employees as the Republican National Committee and its congressional campaign arms had on their main payrolls last month, according to POLITICO’s analysis of tax and campaign documents and interviews with sources familiar with the network.

And the staggering sum the network plans to spend in the 2016 election run-up ― $889 million ― is more than double what the RNC spent in the previous presidential cycle. Story Continued Below. Sheldon Adelson Bets It All. It was around 10:30 p.m. when Steve Jacobs rolled down the gravel driveway.
Money Men Say, Voters Move Over, It's Not Your Election! - BillMoyers.com. David Koch gives a thumbs-up to Republican presidential candidate and former Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain during the Defending the American Dream Summit at the Washington Convention Center November 4, 2011 in Washington, DC.

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) David Brooks is a worried man.
'Hidden History' Of Koch Brothers Traces Their Childhood And Political Rise. David Koch speaks at the Defending the American Dream summit in 2015. He and his brother Charles lead a conservative political network that plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the 2016 elections.
Koch money at WCU remains under scrutiny. Amid federal gridlock, lobbying rises in the states. Abortion Witch Hunt. Weight of Chains.